I love Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence. In retrospect it kind of marks the beginning of his dark period as a film-maker --though obviously the movie would have been even darker had it been directed by Kubrick-- yet it still follows the classic fairy-tale tone of Spielberg's classics, like Close Encounters --where he first used Pinocchio's simbology, which becomes an integral part in A.I.

[Spoiler Alert] In this post I want to bring to your attention the scene where David --the robot child superbly interpreted by Haley Joel Osment-- finds himself in some sort of recreation of his home developed by the super A.I.s from the future; in there he finally meets the Blue Fairy, the one he sought out to find in order to become 'a real live boy'.

But the fairy is nothing but a projection extracted from his own mind so that the A.I.s --which have a peculiarly 'alien' physiognomy-- can safely interact with David without alarming him. I believe this is a great allegory of the way real aliens might be interacting with the human race, by way of using our own subconscious as a suitable interface.

Is this the answer to why so many DMT experiencers report meeting entities that closely resemble alien beings? Could it be that the aliens choose to take advantage of the human mind's inherent capacity to 'unbound' itself (albeit partially) from its Time & Space-constrictions --via psychotropics or other means-- as a way to 'meet us half-way'?

For how else would an alien intelligence --whose mental processes and rationality are by definition beyond our wildest comprehension-- be able to make itself slightly comprehensible to us, if not by hacking our very minds and translating the message to codes and symbols familiar to us?

Wouldn't we try to do the same in our attempts to communicate with other species that co-habit our planet, like dolphins and whales?

Although these ideas are surely not going to be taken seriously by the mainstream attempt to communicate with other sentient beings in the Universe --imagine if instead of investing in ginormous radio telescopes, SETI started growing huge crops of mushrooms!-- this hypothesis is in tandem with the guidelines the UFO phenomenon has been following so far: not behaving like sensible aliens should, by following the rational protocols of meeting with our leaders in order to establish diplomatic relations.

No, the aliens don't seem to give a damn about our pedestrian political structures, and seem to be busily active in developing a 'grassroots' contact with ordinary folks from all walks of life. Furthermore the contact is often heavily charged with meaning of a very intimate nature for the recipient, which makes it highly subjective-- much to the chagrin of 'nuts & bolts' Ufologists, we might add...

In his book Transformation, Whitley Strieber tells how his little son --or someone else communicating through his son--gives him an enigmatic message:

The unconscious mind is like the universe out beyond the quasars. It's a place we want to go to find out what's there

So who knows? you and I might get a chance to meet the Blue Fairy one of these nights, too. A chance to further advance our own evolution, just like David did.

One of my new favorite discoveries on the Internet is Robbie Graham's blog Silver Screen Saucers. Robbie —a doctoral candidate at the University of Bristol— is interested in the huge cultural impact Hollywood had in the shaping of the social beliefs around the UFO phenomenon, as well as the (many) times the US government and its soup-letter agencies have used their influence among the studio moguls for propaganda purposes; something that has intersected more than once with the UFO mystery, we might add.

Recently Robbie asked me to make a contribution to his blog —after reminding him of my lack of credencials, he simply answered that I knew my movies, and I knew my saucers, and that was enough for him. I decided then to review a movie that due to the language barrier has unfortunately passed under the radar of English-speaking Ufologists: the film Platillos Volantes.

I find this film interesting for many reasons, including the fact that it deals with a topic largely ignored in the history of Cinema: the Contactist movement.

It not only looks like the goal will not be reached. It looks like we're actually going backward. And every time I hear politicians justifying why those goals are so hard to accomplish, I feel a certain stiffness in my middle finger...

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines terrorism as "the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion."

Nowadays it's not difficult to think of acts that can be defined as terrorism: the media is constantly bombarding us with images of car bombs, hijacked airplanes, explosions in market places, etc. But now a Mexican government has added Twitter to the list:

A man and a woman are facing 30-year prison terms in Mexico for allegedly using Twitter to spread panic over a series of child kidnappings.

Gilberto Martinez Vera, 48, a private school teacher, and Maria de Jesus Bravo Pagola, a radio presenter, were accused of spreading false reports that gunmen were attacking schools in the south-eastern city of Veracruz.

The resulting panic caused dozens of car crashes after parents rushed to save their children from schools across the city and jammed emergency telephone lines, which "totally collapsed" under the pressure.

Gerardo Buganza, the interior secretary for Veracruz state, compared the ensuing chaos to Orson Welles's spoof news broadcast War of the Worlds in 1938. The two are facing charges under terrorism laws.

"There were 26 car accidents, or people left their cars in the middle of the streets to run and pick up their children, because they thought these things were occurring at their kids' schools," Buganza said.

The charges, which said that phone lines "totally collapsed because people were terrified" are the most serious charges to come from using Twitter to incite violence or chaos.

The incident occurred in the state of Veracruz. The governor of this state, Javier Duarte, is a fine example of the new generation of politicians coming out from the PRI, the political party that controlled the nation for over 70 years: authoritary, intransigent, and nostalgic about the good ole days when no one dared to question the decisions of the government.

This sort of news just illustrate the complete lack of preparedness governments show when dealing with the communication technologies of the XXIst century. I mean sure, I hate Internet trolls as much as anyone, and to use Twitter as a prank to disseminate false information is reprehensible. But does that deserve a conviction of 30 years? in a country where a Cartel hitman that has killed innocent civilians can walk out due to 'insufficient proof', where corrupt politicians can rest assured they will never be held accountable for all the frauds and abuses they commit? I mean, really!

The news provoked a justified outrage among online activists and human rights group. Being so close to the presidential election in 2012, which promises to become a 3-ring circus of accusations and public smear, who's to say some other governor or mayor won't be tempted to enforce the same measures against 'dissident' Twitter users?

In any case, it is very likely that the charges against Martínez and Bravo will be dropped, specially since it transpired that the panic allegedly caused by their prank had in fact started 2 hour before they sent the Tweets:

A story in the local newspaper Imagen (link in Spanish) from a Boca del Rio neighborhood noted that one stampede of parents started about two hours before the day's first tweet from Martinez. By 9 a.m. on Aug. 25, a Thursday, witnesses told the paper, parents were already rushing to the Luis Pasteur primary school after word somehow spread that kids were being kidnapped from campuses.

The events unfolded during the Arab Spring of this year are sure to have caused a lot of concern among all the governments the world. They realized that social networks have the potential to empower citizens who were usually easy to control if you dominated the traditional channels of information: TV, radio and the newspapers. For an authoritarian regime, a blackberry has become more dangerous than a grenade.

This is particularly true for Mexico, where the government has forced the media to moderate their reports related to the violence caused by the War against the organized crime. Many newspapers and TV networks signed a national agreement in order to 'responsibly' inform about the violence --so if you want to learn what's really going on, one has to consult online sites like blog del narco.

The Internet has proven to be one of the more disruptive technologies in the history of civilization. No one could have predicted the vastness of its transformative power in such a small fraction of time. Even visionaries like Arthur C. Clarke, who could imagine manned space trips to the outer reaches of the Solar System to the last detail, turned out to be incredibly naive when it came to the ease of information access --on-line searches, he wrote in his novel 2061, would be incredibly expensive; so any time you complain about the lack of lunar stations, think of Google & Wikipedia to comfort you.

It is a very good thing powerful men are usually short-sighted. Had they foreseen the impact of social networks, it's very likely you would actually need to apply for a license in order to have a Twitter or Facebook account, Think about it.

Also think about the world we're living now today: a world in which someone like Orson Welles would probably end up in Guantanamo for having caused panic about Martians attacking New Jersey.

With each passing year, it's becoming clearer to me that there will come a day when traditional institutions and the brave new digital world will face each other on a final confrontation. Governments and personal computers are inherently incompatible; which one will prevail, it is up to us.

President Calderón has been quick in lay responsibility of this tragedy to the Americans, both the authorities that can't (or won't) control the flow of weapons to Mexico, and to the public that refuse to quit the drugs provided by the cartels.

Bullshit.

It wasn't the drug-trafficking what killed those 53 people. It was corruption.

The newspapers report a gang was blackmailing the casino owners, demanding 100 thousand pesos a week for 'protection'; the owners refused to pay. But why didn't he turn to the authorities and report the extorsion?

They didn't go to the authorities because the casino was illegal; it lacked the proper permits to operate. In fact, of all the gambling centers and bingos established in Mexico, most of them are not 100% legal, exploiting shady technicalities and the support of dirty judges who grant restraining orders called amparos, a legal immunity shield that makes you untouchable... if you have enough money and the proper connections, that is.

Did the gangsters choose this particular casino by mere chance, or were they 'tipped' about its legal situation, which made it a perfect blackmail opportunity? and if that was the case, who gave them the tip?

The brave firefighters that fought tirelessly to save as many victims as they could were so desperate they ended up making a hole in a wall. The reason? the emergency exits in the building were blocked. And where were the inspectors in charge of ensuring entertainment centers comply with all the safety regulations? fires are not the exclusive result of a terrorist attack after all --something Mexico likes to remember one tragedy at a time.

Not 200 meters away of the attack there were a group of policemen, as can be attested by the video-recordings of the security cameras. Why did they do nothing? why didn't they try to pursue the attackers?

Calderón wants to clean the police forces from the bottom up, while He vows to redouble his efforts to fight the organized crime. The philosopher Santayana wrote:

“Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”

Calderón has it all wrong. If he were serious about fighting corruption, then he should start from the top to the bottom. He should incarcerate all the corrupt governors that robbed millions of dollars from their state budgets, along with all the dirty judges who have supported criminals and let them walk free. And let's not forget all the union leaders that use their position as a means to syphon out obscene amounts of money to their personal bank accounts, while they leave their union members without pension after a lifetime of work.

He should do all this, yet he won't. And the reason is simple: he wouldn't have become president in the first place, if it weren't for the help of those people.

Meanwhile he'll keep playing Russian roulette with our lives. And why wouldn't he? no matter the outcome, the house always wins.

A recent discussion held this week at Cryptomundo made think about some of the aspects I dislike the most about the 'skeptical' movement, and people who like to use that term but are in reality as fanatic in their denial as the true believers are in their blind faith.

You see, it's not only the problem that 'skeptics' claim the onus is always on the side of the ufologist/cryptozoologist/ghost-hunter/whathaveyou, even if they never bother to give solid arguments to sustain their refusal to merely entertain the possibility of something truly anomalous, no matter the amount of evidence gathered to support a particular case. What good is evidence --from the Latin word evidentia, implying it's clear and for all to see-- if you don't have the disposition to even look at it with an open mind?

How many of you have fantasized with your favorite skeptic being the actual witness of a UFO landing, a Bigfoot encounter, or a ghost apparition? how many of you have wished them to be on the other side of the experience for a change?

Well, I've got news for you: it wouldn't matter anyway.

Even if something truly anomalous would happen to them, not only would they find plenty of 'resons' to doubt their own subjective experience --Michael Shermer is very fond of saying that trained observers are just as bad as regular Joes when it comes to interpret the things registered by their crappy mammalian optical nerves (think about that next time you take a flight trip) in order to easily dismiss the evidence presented by researches like Leslie Kean without breaking a sweat-- chances are they would probably not register it into their conscious memories anyway!

Either that, or it would be swepped away into their mental 'meh' cabinet file, the same place most folks keep their weird anecdotes so they can focus instead on their day-to-day problems.

When thinking about this, I remembered the ending of the movie The Perfume [spoiler alert] and how Jean-Baptiste Grenouille manages to escape his public execution by exposing the mob to his magic perfume, causing a wonderful massive orgy right in the middle of the town's square:

After the sated peasants come to their senses and quickly gather their clothes, the narrator tells how instead of agreeing never again to discuss their forbidden debauchery, they simply erase it from their memory as if it had never happened. This, I think, is a great allegory of how the human mind usually deals with extraordinary experiences, as a control mechanism that permits a person to keep a preferred belief system even at the face of something that challenges it.

The will to believe is just as strong as the will to deny.

So what would prevent someone from dismissing the anomalous as a simple mental abherration? I guess the answer is: if the anomalous left an indelible trace in the person's life. Consider for example the tale of one Saul of Tarsus, a man who had a deep grudge against a new cult sweeping the ranks around the people of Israel, and was committed to hunt down these dangerous fanatics who called themselves 'Christians'. On his way to Damascus, he came face to face with something remarkable:

And as he journeyed, it came to pass that he drew nigh unto Damascus: and suddenly there shone round about him a light out of heaven: and he fell upon the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And he said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: but rise, and enter into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do. And the men that journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing the voice, but beholding no man. And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw nothing; and they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight, and did neither eat nor drink.

This account, which despite the source's credibility might just be based on a true event (and for the sake of argument let's assume it does) is relevant to the discussion not because of its religious connotation, but because Saul has no choice but to accept the objective reality of what happened to him... on account of him being blinded by it!

Granted, someone reading this could easily point out that everything I've written could easily be switched to the other side of the argument; that true believers' refusal to acknowledge evidence that debunks their favorite cases show the same type of bias and near-sightedness.

What I want to do is appeal for the middle road: being open to all these possibilities, yet remain emotionally impartial and unwilling to fully commit to neither. Accept that there is compelling evidence that suggests the factual existence of anomalous phenomena, but agreeing that so far the evidence does not constitute incontrovertible proof.

Because here's the thing: in their stubborn denial to acknowledge the possible validity of some of the cases presented thus far, and in their stead-fast insitence that the pile of evidence keep rising & raising until it becomes undeniable, I fear the skeptics are not considering the nasty side-effects this behavior causes in the end: the longer we refuse to change our cultural paradigm, the harder will it be for most of us to adjust to that new reality; and the more unpredictable the dominant institutions will become.

Just as the Classical philosophers in Rome and Alexandria never bothered to deal with the irrational currents coming from the Middle East, until they found the world as they knew it ceased to exist and was forgotten for a thousand years, the modern 'skeptics' should acknowledge they are not doing a service to Science by simply dismissing all the accounts given by honest individuals, wishfully thinking that if they heed no attention to them eventually they'll cease to exist.

The longer you stay in the dark, the more you'll be blinded by the light.